Anglo-Norman literature

1. Language

Anglo-Norman is the name given to the dialect of Medieval French imported into Britain in the wake of the Norman Conquest and used there, predominantly by royalty, the nobility, clerics and, increasingly, the higher bourgeoisie, as part of a complex bilingual culture. Anglo-Norman French was always a minority language, and there is no evidence that it ever penetrated significantly into the indigenous population. Its use grew progressively more anachronistic, especially from the second half of the 14th c., and by the middle of the 15th c. it had all but died out. It has, however, left an indelible trace on Modern English.

Anglo-Norman comprised at least four different registers: the first a spoken vernacular, the second an administrative language of record, the third an alternative language of instruction and adjunct to Latin, the fourth a literary language, which could range from the significantly dialectal to a form barely distinguishable from its Continental counterpart. Anglo-Norman must rapidly have ceased to function as a true spoken vernacular, becoming, through the natural processes of diglossia and bilingualism, a second, acquired language probably by the 1160s at the latest. By this date, the descendants of the Norman incomers would have been well able to understand and speak English. It was not, however, until the time of Chaucer that English was to regain its status as the dominant literary language, for Anglo-Norman continued throughout the 13th and 14th c. to be a living language of communication and of record as well as of literature. But, compared with English, which was accessible to both monolingual English speakers and bilingual French speakers, it remained more or less class-exclusive.

Anglo-Norman French had its own recognizable set of orthographic conventions: e.g. spellings such as kaunt (Continental quant), lur (lour), cel (ciel), fei (foi), fere (faire), seignur (seigneur), joefne (jeune); and certain distinctive dialect characteristics: e.g. rhymes of the type tout / fut, mur / fleur, parler / chevalier, and the syllabic instability of e. Other phonetic features included castel (for Continental chastel), gardin (jardin), William (Guillaume), glorie (gloire), cherise (cerise), and a range of aphetic forms such as cater (for ac (h)eter), stoper (estoper), and the antecedents of chess (eschecs), spite (despit), and vanish (esvanir). Occasionally doublets survive which preserve Insular and Continental reflexes of the same word: cattle / chattel, warden / guardian. The borrowing of English words, especially technical terms, is also encountered.

Anglo-Norman exerted a radical influence on the vocabulary of English, which absorbed many thousands of its lexical items, sometimes retaining early forms more or less intact: faith, beast, fierce (fiers), voice; sometimes preserving dialectal variants: affray, spouse, meddle, fee, plank, finish, chive; usually modifying both the pronunciation and the spelling of adopted forms—beef, tower, jaw (joue), usher (uissier), nephew, purse—occasionally to the point of obscuring their Anglo-Norman origins: fashion (façon), mushroom (mousseron), jeopardy (jeu parti), puny (puisné), curfew (cuevre-feu), and wicket (guichet). The legal vocabulary of Modern English is almost exclusively Anglo-Norman in derivation. As a literary language, Anglo-Norman was, despite the fluidity of its spelling systems, not only perfectly grammatical but capable also of being highly expressive and inventive. Except occasionally in its later, more idiosyncratic phase, it was far from the bastardized jargon so often denigrated by Continental contemporaries. Its verse, however, frequently shows a less than rigorous adherence to regular syllabic models.

2. General Characteristics of the Literature

As far as Anglo-Norman literature is concerned, the very term is problematic. How valid a category is it? To what extent is its existence predicated on other than linguistic (dialectal) difference? In what relationship do its constituent elements stand to those of its Continental counterpart? How far does an exclusive delineation need to be made between, on the one hand, indigenous production of literary works and, on the other, Insular patronage, reception, and conservation of literary texts in Continental French? Seen as the whole corpus of writings produced in French in the British Isles from the time of the Norman Conquest until the close of the Middle Ages, Anglo-Norman literature can be said to occupy a significant place in the evolution of both Medieval French and Middle English literatures.

Among its most salient features are its quantity, its diversity, and its longevity. It clearly benefited from enlightened patronage, both clerical and secular, and the multicultural, polyglot environment in which it developed enabled it both to innovate and to thrive. Viewed historically, Anglo-Norman literature shows a quite remarkable precocity in its first century of production, the 12th, which sees the earliest appearance in French literature of the rhymed chronicle, Celtic and Arthurian narratives, eyewitness historiography, scientific, administrative, scholastic, and biblical texts. While certain of the traditional genres of medieval literature, such as devotional works and hagiography, are particularly well exemplified in Anglo-Norman, others, for instance the epic and the secular lyric, are noticeably under-represented. It is in the historiographical domain that Insular French makes its most durable literary impact through the transmission of the Arthurian matière de Bretagne. The romance flourished in Britain during the 12th and 13th c., though Anglo-Norman representatives of the genre show a marked preference for its non-courtly mode, privileging the adventure-narrative dimension, often within a dynastic framework. The shorter lai and the fabliau are also represented, and some Anglo-Norman drama has survived.

3. Narrative Forms

a. Romance. Only 3, 000 lines survive from what must have originally been a 13, 000-line romance of Tristan by Thomas. Incomplete though it is, this poem (c.1160-90) represents for many the finest achievement of Anglo-Norman literature. A pervading sense of human imperfection and necessary suffering is counterbalanced by a wealth of incisive psychological observation and analysis of the effects of fatal adulterous passion. Thomas's treatment of human love, with its unremitting vocabulary of affliction, stands in ambiguous contrast to much contemporary courtly writing on fin'amor. Amadas et Idoine, from the late 12th c., is a story of ‘fine loial amour’ which shadows the Tristan and Iseut legend to propose a model of ideal, socially integrated love.

Love occupies a less prominent role in the Anglo-Norman romance of Horn by Mestre Thomas (c.1170; later reworked into Middle English as king Horn), despite its being structured narratively round the hero's wooing of, and eventual marriage to, the princess Rigmel. This is not, however, a courtly romance, and its real theme is feudal vassalage and Horn's heroic pursuit of his birthright and dynastic justice. Set in a remote, archaic past reminiscent of the Danish invasions, but portraying a plethora of contemporary social detail, the narrative is skilfully patterned by parallelism and repetition. Its rhyming alexandrine laisses have clear epic resonances. The Lai d'Haveloc (c.1200), deriving from an episode interpolated into Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis, offers close thematic parallels with Horn. Influence of epic discourse is very much in evidence in Thomas of Kent's Roman de toute chevalerie (c.1175), an independent version of the Alexander legend. The 13th c. Amys e Amillyoun belongs to the romance rather than to the epic tradition of this widespread and popular legend of brotherhood. [see Ami et Amile].

The tradition of the so-called Byzantine romance is represented in Anglo-Norman by two long narrative poems by Hue de Rotelande. A self-conscious writer with a sharp wit and a well-developed sense of literary irony, he uses parodic inversion to good effect. But his subtlety can easily be swamped by his narrative. However prolix and repetitive to the modern eye, runaway plots evidently appealed to contemporary audiences. Ipomedon (c.1180) treats the theme of love and chivalry within the courtly tradition, telling in a gently cynical way of the adventures that befall the King of Apulia's son in his amorous pursuit and ultimate conquest of La Fiere, duchess of Calabria. Ipomedon's son is the protagonist of Hue's second romance, Protheselaus (c.1190), which exploits, at considerable length and without much inspiration, what was destined to become the staple thematic diet of Anglo-Norman adventure-romance: unjust disinheritance / exile / return / reinstatement.

This narrative structure, already discernible in Horn, characterizes also the inordinately long Roman de Waldef, Gui de Warewic, and Boeve de Haumtone, all three dating from the first half of the 13th c. Satisfying an insatiable appetite for action and fastmoving unilinear plots that accumulate stock literary motifs, these breathless narratives follow the superhuman exploits of dispossessed baronial heroes across the length and breadth of Europe, sometimes even into Africa and the Middle East, until, covered in personal and dynastic glory, they return home to claim their rightful inheritance. Fouke le fitz Waryn, an early 14th-c. prose reworking of a lost poem from the later 13th c., celebrates with verve and humour the fictionalized exploits of the fitz Waryn family, highlighting particularly Fulk III's disinheritance by King John, his defiance and subsequent outlawry, and his eventual pardon and reinstatement. There is no firm evidence to substantiate the claim that Waldef, Gui, Boeve, and Fouke were initially patronized by specific Anglo-Norman families as dynastic propaganda, and their categorization as ‘ancestral romances’ is misleading. The British setting for the narratives of Guillaume d'Angleterre, a 12th-c. adventure romance sometimes attributed to Chrétien de Troyes, and of Fergus, a 13th-c. Arthurian romance by Guillaume le Clerc, may possibly point to some sort of Insular patronage, but both are Continental French and not Anglo-Norman poems.

b. Lais. Among the shorter narrative forms in Anglo-Norman, pride of place must go to the curiously named Breton (meaning, of course, Celto-British) lais, particularly those of Marie de France. A skilful and learned Continental poet at the court of Henry II, she wrote a series of short lyrical narratives, for which she claims oral Celtic sources. Though her French is not distinctively Anglo-Norman, Insular culture inspires and pervades her work. Also attributed to Marie is a collection of fables (the Ysopet) and a version of St Patrick's Purgatory. Le Lai del Desiré, a fairy-mistress story set at the court of the King of Scotland, has affinities with Marie's Lanval as well as with Chrétien's Yvain. La Folie Tristan d'Oxford (late 12th c.?) presents a résumé of the legend reminiscent of Thomas's version, blending analysis and realism within a moral perspective. Le Donnei des amanz (c.1180) is a debate between a lady and her lover in which each compares the other to Tristan and Iseut as models for emulation. Robert Biket's hexasyllabic Lai du Cor (c.1200?), a variation on the chastity-testing theme, is Arthurian and in the courtly mode, but parodically so. A handful of Anglo-Norman fabliaux survive which show no significant departures from the literary pattern established on the Continent. The 13th-c. De la bounté des femmes, perhaps from the pen of Nicole Bozon, deserves mention as a rare pro-feminist poem.

c. Epic. The closest we come to an indigenous Anglo-Norman epic is an 800-line Insular continuation, dating from the middle of the 13th c., of La Destructioun de Rome. Anglo-Norman copies of Continental epics are, however, plentiful, and epic influence is discernible in several Insular narratives. The survival, moreover, in Anglo-Norman manuscripts of the oldest extant text of the Chanson de Roland, and of the unique copies of Le Voyage de Charlemagne, La Chanson de Guillaume, and Gormont et Isembart is adequate proof that the epic genre was known and appreciated in 12th- and early 13th-c. Britain. A fluent translation of the Latin prose Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, a clerical reworking of the Chanson de Roland tradition, was written (1214-16) by William de Briane.

4. Historiography

Anglo-Norman literature is perhaps most widely known for its early and innovative achievements in historiography, and these are no doubt to be explained in part by the multiculturism and multilingualism that characterized Insular society. Master Geffrei Gaimar used Latin, French, and English written sources to compile his long and ambitious rhymed chronicle charting the history of Britain from Jason and Brutus down to the death of Rufus (1100). Only the second part of this, L'Estoire des Engleis (c.1136-8), has survived. Much of it is a close translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but in the post-Conquest section Gaimar is able to present a lively and lucid account of events. The first part of his chronicle was no doubt eclipsed by the appearance, in 1155, of Wace's Roman de Brut, a highly influential text in the development of the matière de Bretagne.

The earliest example in French literature of contemporary historical writing in the vernacular is Jordan Fantosme's largely eyewitness account of the rebellion of the Young King in 1173-4. This curious, mixed-prosody poem, which offers an orthodox providential view of history, makes considerable use of epic language and maintains a good narrative pace. Historians find some of Fantosme's material useful. The poet responsible for the Song of Dermot and the Earl (end of 12th c.?), a rhymed history of the Conquest of Ireland between 1152 and 1175, also looked to the epic for inspiration, but in vain.

L'Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal (c.1225) was written under Insular patronage by a Continental poet who trod the broad common ground between the truth of events and the truth of literature. Over little short of 20, 000 octosyllables he reconstructs a life of William Marshal which, though far from unrealistic, owes much to literary convention. His verses often lack, however, the refinement of romance discourse. Some historians grant the poem the status of biography. The rhymed Des grantz geanz (13th c.) proposes an alternative, female-oriented founding narrative to explain the name Albion: Albine and her Greek sisters arrived in Britain 260 years before Brutus. Peter of Langtoft, a canon of Bridlington, seems to have started his Chronicle, towards 1294, as an account of the reign of Edward I, but in subsequent redactions its scope was extended backwards as far as Brutus and forwards up to 1307. Historical writing continued unabated throughout the 14th c. with, amongst many others, Nicholas Trevet's Chronicle (1328-35), Sir Thomas Gray of Heton's Scalacronica (1355-60), the Anonimalle Chronicle, Le Brut d'Engleterre, and a life of the Black Prince (c.1385) by Chandos Herald.

5. Drama and Lyric

Though authoritative voices have claimed otherwise, evidence is slim for including the earliest surviving drama wholly in the French vernacular, the Jeu (or Mystère) d'Adam (c.1150-60?), within the Anglo-Norman canon. The first indisputably Anglo-Norman drama is La Seinte Resurreccion (c.1200, modern title La Résurrection du Sauveur), whose fragmentary narrative is that of the Descent and Entombment with the addition of the legend of Longinus. The prologue provides a particularly detailed description of the play's staging. The dialogue, in octosyllabic couplets and interspersed with narrative sections, is firmly structured and has a natural fluency, while its dramatic tempo is well maintained. It has been suggested that a series of mystery plays lies embedded in Herman de Valenciennes's Li Romanz de Dieu et de sa mere, though the Anglo-Norman provenance of this rhymed paraphrase of the Bible (c.1190) is far from clear.

Macaronic verse, both religious and secular, is a characteristic of Anglo-Norman literature. ‘En may …’, for example, is an unusual Anglo-Norman/Latin pastorela, ‘Mayden moder milde’ a song-prayer in alternating half-lines of English and French, while ‘Dum ludis floribus’ and ‘De amico ad amicam’ contrive to fuse French, English, and Latin into the traditional format of the love-song. A series of bilingual political songs, in French and English, from the reign of Edward I are incorporated by Peter of Langtoft into his Chronicle. Much Anglo-Norman lyric poetry seems to have been designed for use in para-liturgical and homiletic contexts (there are numerous hymns to the Virgin), though poems such as ‘Bele mere, ke fray?’, a spirited example of the courtly débat amoureux, the reverdie ‘Ferroy chaunsoun’, the technically sophisticated ‘El tens d'iver’, and Bozon's anti-feminist ‘Les femmes a la pie’ serve to show that secular tastes were not only indulged but cultivated on occasion with skill and inventiveness. Gower's Cinkante Balades (1399-1400) are for the most part polished and highly proficient variations on conventional themes, written in a French which is more Continental than Insular.

6. Religious Writing

a. Hagiography. Anglo-Norman was used not only within the cloister as an alternative to Latin, but also among the wider religious community as a medium of moral instruction for the laity, and a particularly extensive corpus of doctrinal literature has come down to us. The field of vernacular hagiography was intensely cultivated in Anglo-Norman. Though preserved in its oldest form within the St Albans' Psalter (1120-30), the Vie de saint Alexis, in assonating decasyllabic stanzas of rare poetic beauty, is in all likelihood of earlier, Norman origin. To the nun Clemence of Barking, who composed La Vie de sainte Catherine in the last quarter of the 12th c., goes the credit of being French literature's earliest named woman author. Her octosyllabic poem is distinguished by the elaborate integration of the vocabulary of fin'amor into its pious narrative. Clemence may have been the same person as the anonymous nun of Barking who, in her Vie d'Edouard le Confesseur (1163-9?), defensively but quite unnecessarily apologizes for her ‘faus franceis d'Angletere’. The murder of Thomas Becket in 1170 gave rise to vernacular Lives by the Continental Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence (1170-4), and by Beneit, monk of St Albans (c.1184), who wrote in sixline tail-rhyme stanzas. Other monks composed saints' lives in French: Denis Pyramus, a Benedictine of Bury (St Edmund), and, also from Bury, Simon of Walsingham (St Faith). By the end of the 12th c., the ranks of Anglo-Norman hagiography had been further swollen by lives of St Nicholas and St Margaret (both by Wace), La Passiun de seint Edmund, Saint Modwenna, La Vie de saint Laurent, La Vie de saint Gilles by Guillaume de Berneville, La Passion de saint George by Simund de Freine, La Vie de saint Josaphaz by Chardri. Among the more interesting texts is La Vie de saint Auban (1235-57) by the St Albans monk and chronicler Matthew Paris, preserved in the author's illustrated holograph. It is archaic in form and tone, and the verse has a robust, epic quality. Matthew also translated the lives of Edward, Edmund of Abingdon, and Thomas Becket into Anglo-Norman, illustrating the texts himself and even circulating them among aristocratic ladies of his acquaintance. The other saints celebrated in Anglo-Norman are too numerous to mention. Often classified as a saint's life, but wrongly so, is Benedeit's Voyage de saint Brendan (c.1106), a voyage narrative of Celtic origin, vividly written, tightly structured, and resolutely monastic in perspective. It inaugurated the use of the octosyllabic rhyming couplet.

b. Biblical Translation [see Bible]. When the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury compiled the lavish Eadwine Psalter (1155-60), they incorporated pre-existing Anglo-Norman translations between the lines of the Hebraicum. Several other Anglo-Norman Psalters survive from the 12th c. The translation of the Books of Samuel and Kings known as Li Quatre Livre des Reis (late 12th c.) deserves particular interest for the quality of its rhythmical, poetic prose. The Book of Judges was also translated into Anglo-Norman for the Templars during the 12th c. A prose translation of the Apocalypse appeared towards 1250, and William Giffard's rhymed version dates from the end of the 13th c. The Holkham Bible Picture Book (1320-30) has a full range of captions in Anglo-Norman octosyllables.

c. Religious Verse. Latin learning became more accessible through vernacular poetry. French literature owes its earliest scholastic text to one Sanson de Nantuil, whose Proverbes de Salemon (c.1150) translates the Book of Proverbs and its gloss into over 11, 000 rhyming octosyllables. This was followed, around 1200, by Simund de Freine's Roman de philosophie, a verse vulgarization of Boethius, and by La Petite Philosophie (c.1230), a rhyming scientific treatise on the nature of the world. Among the Anglo-Norman religious verse written for secular instruction was St Edmund of Abingdon's much used manual of meditation, Mirour de Seinte Eglyse, the Manuel des péchés (c.1260), an encyclopaedic aid to confession of over 11, 000 lines (translated by Robert Mannyng as Handlyng Synne), the even longer Lumere as lais (1267) by Pierre d'Abernon of Fetcham (sometimes Peckham), and Robert of Greatham's Corset and Evangiles des domnees (c.1260?). The Château d'Amour (c.1250), attributed to Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, makes more use of allegory, and this tradition is continued by Henry of Lancaster in his Seyntz Medicines (1354) and by Gower in his Mirour de l'omme (c.1380). Religious allegorical verse was but one of the accomplishments of the Franciscan Nicole Bozon (c.1280-1330); probably the most prolific and versatile of Anglo-Norman poets, his output ranged from poems on the Virgin, saints' lives, sermons and exemplum tales, to satires and proverbs.

7. Didactic Texts

Literary texts in Anglo-Norman could also serve more immediately practical functions. In 1113 Philippe de Thaon provided the chaplain to the king's steward with a translation into rhyming hexasyllabic couplets of the Computus, a treatise to calculate the Church calendar. Hardly less unexpected is the translation into Anglo-Norman verse of the Hospitallers' Rule (1181-5). The early use of Anglo-Norman in administrative life is shown in two vernacular charters of c.1140 and 1170, and a translation of the Laws of William the Conqueror (c.1150). Professional treatises on estate-management appeared during the 13th c. with Robert Grosseteste's Reules, Walter of Henly's Dité de hosbonderie, and the anonymous Seneschaucie. Administrative Anglo-Norman is particularly rich from the 14th c. onwards: municipal records, pleas, court proceedings, legal treatises, the parliamentary rolls, and the statutes of the realm.

Several literary texts take inspiration from the multilingualism that characterized the Insular nobility. Walter of Bibbesworth, whose rhymed Tretiz pur aprise de langage (second half of 13th c.) was based largely on distinguishing between homophones, wrote from within the learned tradition of glossaries and vocabularies. His aim was to provide his patron's presumably anglophone son with sufficient knowledge of French words to enable him to manage his estate. Walter's text was incorporated, together with a rhymed treatise on courtesy called Urbain le courtois, into a linguistic manual in verse known under the title of Nova femina (14th c.), in recognition of women's role as natural language teachers. The teaching of the written rather than the spoken language is the aim of the prose treatise Orthographia gallica (14th c.), which may well have been intended to meet the needs of the legal profession. Business and secretarial training in Anglo-Norman was catered for by manuals by Thomas Sampson and, in the early 15th c., William Kingsmill. Three versions of the Maniere de langage (1396-1415) teach Anglo-Norman by the conversational method, while John Barton's Donnait françois (1409) imparts grammatical knowledge in the more austere tradition of the schools.

8. Anglo-Norman Literature and the Continent

While some didactic works are obviously responses to needs peculiar to English society, it is much less easy to discern any significant Insular specificity within the broader totality of the Anglo-Norman literary texts produced in Britain between the 12th and the 15th c. French, it must be remembered, was an international language, and all literature in French belonged to a wide cultural hegemony. It is, therefore, as an integral part of French literature as a whole, rather than as an essentially national subculture, that Anglo-Norman literary production can be most profitably understood and evaluated. Far from coming to an end with the English loss of Normandy in 1204, cross-Channel relations continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages. The works of Chaucer and Gower show close familiarity with Continental culture, and it is safe to assume that a large measure of literary interchange in both directions must always have been a feature of Anglo-French relations. Not even the Hundred Years War succeeded in compromising this shared culture: Richard II was an appreciative recipient and reader of Froissart's verse, and Charles d'Orléans whiled away his captivity after Agincourt composing poetry in English.

Much maligned, in the early part of this century, by French medievalists who condescendingly and proscriptively dubbed it ‘le mauvais français d'Angleterre’, and who considered its literature as belonging to an Insular backwater out of the Continental mainstream, Anglo-Norman is today able to claim its rightful place and status, that of an innovative and uniquely productive medium of oral and written communication which made a rich and varied contribution to both French and British cultures.

[Ian Short]

Bibliography

• M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background (1963)